Rogue Med Student Tackles the Web's Ultimate Irony

Share

Rogue Med Student Tackles the Web's Ultimate Irony

Tim Berners-Lee created the web as a better way of sharing academic research. But it soon morphed into something much, well, larger.

The irony, says Ijad Madisch, is that while reinventing so many other aspects of our life, the web never really overturned the world of academic publishing. More than 30 years on, we're still relying on old-fashioned peer-reviewed academic journals to share research among the world's leading thinkers.

But Madisch wants to change that. In 2008, the former medical student and virology Ph.D. candidate founded a web service called ResearchGate, which seeks to replace peer-reviewed journals with a kind of Facebook for scientists.

It's a way of bringing academics together online, but it's also a means of instantly publishing research. Yes, there are other sites that let you self-publish academic work – most notably Cornell University's arXiv and the Public Library of Science – but ResearchGate goes further. Part of the aim is to share research even before it's packaged into a formal paper – including "negative data" that may show that a particular thesis isn't worth following.

"There has to be a way for scientists to share negative data, so that we're not just making the same mistakes again and again," Madisch says. "We spend so much time and money on experiments that we already know don't work."

Today, the service claims nearly 2 million registered users, and though it continues to battle the skepticism of researchers who still see traditional journals as the best way to share and validate research – not to mention build a career – it's slowly winning over many of its most ardent critics.

"It's a great thing – and I was surprised it's a great thing," says Rafael Luque, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Córdoba, who shares completed research papers as well as raw experiments and ideas. "At first, it looked like just another version of Facebook. I have nothing against Facebook. I just don't have time for it. But ResearchGate is different. It stimulates thought."

"He said: 'Get this firlefanz out of your head.' Firlefanz means 'shit of bird.' So, he wanted me to get 'this nonsense' out of my head and focus on my academic career." — Ijad MadischMadisch grew up in Germany, where he studied medicine before coming to the States for an M.D.-Ph.D. program at Harvard. It was there he dreamed up the idea of ResearchGate. "I wanted to form teams of scientists all over the world," he says. "And I wanted to go across disciplines." The idea was so attractive to him, he eventually decided to curtail his medical studies so he could spend more time developing it – a decision that raised the ire of his longtime adviser back in Germany.

"He said: "Get this firlefanz out of your head,'" Madisch remembers. "Firlefanz means 'shit of bird.' So, he wanted me to get 'this nonsense' out of my head and focus on my academic career."

But back in the States, others believed in the idea, most notably Matt Cohler, a partner with big name VC firm Benchmark Capital. "Despite the fact that this is what the world wide web was initially developed for, so many problems with academic research are still unsolved," Cohler says. "All these years later, there is still enormous waste and inefficiency."

When the two first met to discuss the project, Cohler asked Madish what he saw as his ultimate goal for ResearchGate. "To win the Nobel Prize," Madisch said, and apparently, this unexpectedly enormous ambition sealed the deal.

Madish eventually quit his medical studies altogether, and four years on, he says, ResearchGate spans more than 11,000 educational institutions across the globe, and it continues to grow at a steady clip. Rafael Luque started an organic chemistry group on the site in 2008, and it has now grown to over 2,000 members.

Madisch has yet to win the Nobel Prize. But he has reached another major milestone that even he didn't expect. About three months ago, the professor who called his idea "bird shit" signed up for ResearchGate. For years, Madisch and others at the company had used the professor's name to set up dummy accounts on the service as a way of demonstrating how it worked. They assumed it was name that would otherwise never appear on site. But then it did.